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A few hours ago, Israeli channel 11 reported that between May-July 2025 the Israeli army took 1,000 trucks of international aid for Gaza and buried it in pits and set it on fire. Over a third of Gazans now go days without food. At least 85 children have died of starvation, including today a baby girl  Zeinab Abu Halib. She died weighing less than when she was born. Over 100 aid organizations have sounded the alarm: "As mass starvation spreads across Gaza, our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away." The aid trucks sit on the border in Egypt, spoiling with maggots in the baking sun.

More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed at aid sites so far. One Israeli soldier calls them “a killing field” where senior commanders give orders to fire into unarmed crowds: “They're treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” I keep thinking about Jews in Auschwitz being deceived by the promise that the gas chambers were just a shower. Now starving Palestinians in Gaza are lured to their gunshot-studded deaths, deceived by promises of a bag of grain. A former US special forces officer who witnessed the IDF described it thus: "They’re criminal. I have fought ISIS, the Taliban. In my entire career I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population. An unarmed starving population."

A Palestinian journalist Motasem A Dalloul who witnessed the aid sites described it as follows: "Each time, around 60,000 to 70,000 Palestinians converge at the designated site. Loudspeakers announce that when the green light turns on, people have just *10 minutes* to grab between 300 to 400 aid packages—though much of the critical supplies, like flour, sugar, and salt, are snatched up first by gangs and collaborators. After the 10-minute window, the light then turns yellow, signaling that only 5 minutes remain to flee before automatic machine guns open fire indiscriminately on anyone still in the area."

The concentration continues. On July 20, Israel just issued new “evacuation orders” for Deir al-Balah. More than 80% of Gaza is already under orders, and there is nowhere safe to go. In evacuation zones, anyone can be labeled a terrorist and killed. One Brigadier General Yehuda Vach who prowls Gaza with his troops and bulldozers said it like this: “there are no innocents in Gaza… Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise.” The defense minister, Israel Katz, described plans earlier this month to create a 'city' on the ruins of Rafah were Palestinians would not be allowed to leave once they enter. It would become a staging ground to deport or “voluntarily relocate" Palestinians. An army source clarified: "the army doesn’t use the words ‘ghetto’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ [but] it’s a de facto ghetto.” A few days ago, the Knesset discussed plans to expel all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and settle in their place 1.2 million Jews.

The crimes are by design. In October 2023, when Netanyahu began talking about Amalek, and when images of Palestinians as bugs/cockroaches flooded Israeli social media, anyone with a grasp of history knew what was happening. In the words of Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council and adviser to the defense minister, the goal of the war was “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable” so that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” The cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu said in Jan 2024 “The army must find ways more painful than death for the civilians in Gaza. Killing them is not enough.” At least they are honest: they describe plainly in words what is Israeli policy in action.

He gloated again this week: "The government is rushing to erase Gaza, and thank God we are erasing this evil. All of Gaza will be Jewish." Another cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich said in Jan 2025, "Gaza is devastated and disbanded, unworthy of residence, and it will remain so. Don't be impressed by the forced joy of our enemies, it's an animal society that celebrates death and dances on the ruins of life. Very quickly, we will erase their smile again and replace it with the cries of the broken and the whining of those who are left with nothing." It is a sentiment that unfortunately describes the majority of the Israeli public, political leadership, and military policy. Genocide is the intention of the Israeli state. All of this is directed toward Palestinians who are not so different from us and not so different than Jews. “I was born just like you” wrote the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “I have a mother and a home with many windows. I have brothers, friends and a prison with one cold window. A wave stolen by seagulls...”

Now a section of the Western political elite dimly sense that they must gesture emptily against this: Emmanuel Macron, Hillary Clinton, Keir Starmer, Amy Klobucher, Michael Carney, Friedrich Merz, Josh Shapiro, Giorgia Meloni, Nikki Haley, Hakeem Jeffries, and so on. A collection of European countries now demand the war to stop. But these were the ones who enabled and supported and rooted for it from the beginning, who ignored the ICC arrest warrants, who stood and smiled with Netanyahu, whose national arms companies inked new deals with Israel. They are no better than Trump. Absolutely none of their crocodile tears matter unless concrete measures are taken to stop the flow of weapons and finance to Israel, to expel it from the UN, to sanction its officials, to intervene militarily against it. There is nothing special about Israel in this regard; if it wants to behave like Greater Serbia, it should be treated like Greater Serbia. The same for any fascist society.

Our countries, and at the murderous head of them, the United States of America, are the ones who paid for the weapons with our taxes, who made the bombs in our factories, who sent them on our ships, who signed them in sharpie, who financed the killing with our bonds, with our retirement savings and with our index funds, who hounded the activists and criminalized dissent. It was Christian Europe that created both the demand for the modern Zionist movement and the demographic supply, shoving the antisemitic problem of Europe's 'Jewish Question' into British colonial Palestine. Our media, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, were the ones that spread the lies about UNRWA being Hamas, about Oct 7th gang rape, about beheaded babies, when it was our countries that sent children to their graves without skulls. It was the United States that defunded UNRWA, that paid 70% of the war costs, that gave the apartheid state a fat supply of JDAMs, bombs, machine guns, bulldozers, fighter jets, and THAAD missile batteries.

I am reminded of Aime Cesaire's prophetic words: "Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler...People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack."

My friends, we live sadly in a Nazi society that is run by Nazis and that is organized on the principle that other people are less human and must be murdered. We must make this the center of action. As a comrade said "When I say the Palestinian issue is preeminent for me, I do not mean that it comes before every other issue. I mean that it's the primary contradiction around which everything else unravels. This is it friends. This is what slavery was to the 19th century. It is the check coming due." I pray that we muster the courage to fight it until the end with our whole being. That we learn to love with the fires of rage in our hearts. The words of the Algerian-French poet Anna Gréki hit me like a train:

"Standing like reed in my tongue the screams

Of my friends cut the bruised peace

Forever—in my tongue and in all the folds

Of the gleaming night—I can no longer love

But with this wound in my heart with this wound

In my memory tied like a net

A defused grenade the heavy night rolls

Beneath its oleanders where the sea ferments

With the smell of warm tar in the waves

I think of friends who died before they could be loved

I think of friends who were murdered

Because of the love they knew how to give

I can no longer love but with rage in my heart."

I can no longer love but with rage in my heart.

My morning was darkened by chilling developments that remind me of Adolf Hitler. Yesterday Israel killed 40 people in Gaza while two Palestinian gunmen, apparently operating alone, opened fire on a Jerusalem bus stop, killing six people. In response, the German foreign minister condemned the second incident but left the first unmentioned. Mr. Katz, the Israeli Defense Minister then instructed "the imposition of civilian sanctions on the relatives and residents of the villages" where the attackers may have come from. He authorized the military to "demolish every illegal structure in the villages" (Israel considers most Palestinian homes illegal) and "to revoke 750 work permits and entry permits" that allow Palestinians to travel and work.

The Nazi occupiers also used such collective punishment tactics in Yugoslavia. For every German soldier killed, the Wehrmacht infamously killed 100 people. This was ostensibly intended to drain support for the partisan movement. Entire regions of the Balkans were depopulated through such means. One example is a public notice in Nazi-occupied Serbia on 21 Oct 1941 stating that the Nazis' Kragujevac massacre of 2,300 people was retaliation for the killing of 10 German soldiers by Yugoslav "bandits". It promised the "same severity" (100 Slavs for each German, 50 Slavs for each wounded German) in future incidents. Collective punishment is morally heinous and was outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. It also backfired. If a German was killed, nearly the entire local population joined the partisan resistance because the alternative was certain death by Nazi fire squads. Now Israel does the same. As Aharon Haliva, head of the IDF Intelligence Directorate said around March 2025, “For every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter if they are children. They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price.”

The second development is the massive invasion of Gaza City by Israeli forces. Gaza City is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world -- the home of Gaza's churches, Roman ruins, and a refuge of its surviving populace. It's one of the last places not fully destroyed. But as the prime minister Mr. Netanyahu announced yesterday, Israel has "evacuated" the entire population (they will not be allowed to return, and their homes will be destroyed) and "flattened all terrorist infrastructure" which includes in his words "terrorist high-rises". They have destroyed 50 such apartment buildings in recent days.

This crime reminds me of the Nazi razing of the city of Warsaw in late 1944. The destruction of the city had long been planned as part of the Nazis' Generalplan Ost to colonize Slavic lands in the east. After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was crushed in spring 1943 (Jews were massacred or deported for "voluntary resettlement"), the entire city of Warsaw itself staged an uprising in 1944 led by the Polish resistance. This uprising incensed the Nazi occupiers. As SS commander in chief Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of SS officers in 17 October 1944, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation."

This is Israeli policy in Gaza. It is reminiscent of Nazi activity in Central Europe but has its own genealogy. One origin is Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut. It demands massive, disproportionate destruction of infrastructure as a form of collective punishment and "deterrence". Its aims coincide with Israeli expansionist desires to colonize its periphery with loyal co-ethnics and displace the existing inhabitants, which it sees as an enemy population. Indeed, by killing and oppressing the Arabs who live there, Israel has in fact become their enemy.

Genocidal ideology thrives on these self-fulfilling prophesies. In the words of genocide scholar A Dirk Moses, genocide “produces the truth the perpetrators want to prevent.” The ‘world Jewry' for instance did not come to oppose the Nazi state in the 1930s because it set out to destroy Germany, as the Nazis claimed. But Nazi persecution did unite the Jewish community against the Nazi state. At that point, the Nazis’ paranoia had become, in a perverse way, true — Jews and many Gentile Slavs opposed the Nazis, and thus, in the paranoid Nazi mind, deserved complete destruction lest their children grow up and also threaten German rule.

A former IDF military intelligence officer and popular Israeli ideologue Eliyahu Yossian gave a stark articulation of this principle in an interview on December 27, 2023: if Israel doesn’t kill the children of Gaza, then a ‘little” child will become a “big” child when he grows up and “become a replacement to the terrorist.” Peace and restraint is, in his words, a naive ‘Western’ solution for an ‘Eastern’ problem like Gaza. Instead “The answer is simply leveling the ground, and to kill the largest number possible. Because the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, the first grader is the enemy.”

Yossian’s preferred solution was not really ‘Eastern’ at all, but was tried by an iconic Western state: Germany. As General Otto Ohlendorf told the prosecutors in Nuremberg, German extermination policy during the war was not that different from what God commanded the Israelites to do in the Bible to other tribes in Canaan: “The children were people who would grow up and surely, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents.” Ohlendorf argued the Holocaust was not a racist program; Jewish children and pregnant women had to be killed to achieve “permanent security” for the German government and people.

Israeli leaders take a similar line of thinking on Gaza when they invoke the Biblical command to “wipe out the memory of Amalek”. As the Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi wrote in January 2024, “if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you” [Numbers 33:55]. For the minister, “voluntary migration” from Gaza does not have to be voluntary. In his words, “voluntary is at times a state you impose until they give their consent.” The army must keep killing in Gaza because “everything that our God bequeathed unto us, we shall inherit… and that is Gaza and its daughters.”

As the Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said in July 2025, “All of Gaza will be Jewish. The government is racing to erase Gaza. Thank God, we’re erasing this evil, and erasing the population”. Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi in February 2025: “Who is innocent in Gaza?... They are scum and no one in the world wants them. The children and women must be separated, and the adults in Gaza must be eliminated”. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in May 2025: “We conquer, cleanse, and stay... On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains. We're breaking Gaza apart, leaving it as a pile of rubble. And the world still hasn’t stopped us.”

Smotrich is exactly right. The world hasn’t stopped it. In fact, we are abetting the horrors every day, especially the U.S. government. Like the Nazis, the time has passed to ask Israel to change course. We did not ask or chide Hitler to change course. We fought a world war and hung the surviving Nazi war criminals on ropes at Nuremberg. It is time for the world to intervene militarily to end the war, stop the genocide in Gaza, convict the genocidaires in courts of law, and dismantle the Israeli state in favor of a peaceful, democratic, and secular state in Palestine from the river to the sea with equal rights for all people regardless of their ethnic or religious background. Such is the long-term hope of the Palestinian national movement, as articulated by its most eloquent proponents. To that end, I support concrete measures to debilitate the Israeli state, and I think anyone with a moral compass and a critical mind should do the same. The bloodshed needs to end.

That graphic scene of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck I've seen relentlessly over the past two years, in Gaza and our schools. 1,838 killed in Gaza waiting for food since late May, another 13,409 wounded, overwhelmingly by Israeli snipers with their US-issued M16s. Tens of thousands of violent deaths by gunfire, tank round, airstrike; half a million starving, 92% of Gaza’s buildings razed. Meanwhile, Kirk’s assassination is the 46th school shooting in the U.S. this year. From Minneapolis to Colorado, from Columbine to Sandy Kook, we give young, disaffected men widespread access to firearms and reap the consequences.

Of course, there will be no national eulogy for them. No American president will order the flags lowered to half mast for Hind Rajab. The Israeli killers of the U.S. citizen Aysenur Eygi will not face justice, nor will those of Rachel Corrie. The vice president will not hold the casket of the martyred children of Evergreen Highschool in Colorado or Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota. We will not hear apoplectic outpourings of sympathy about the assassinated Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband. The MIT president will not send a condolence email about 20,000 Palestinian children killed. She will for Charlie Kirk. New York Times’ Ezra Klein will not write a tribute to Refaat Alareer, or the hundreds of slain journalists in Gaza.  He will for Charlie Kirk. The U.S. state department will not deny visas for “making light” of Yaqeen Hammad’s death. It will for Charlie Kirk.

Gushing condolences are instead reserved for the YouTuber, Trump ally, and founder of the largest MAGA youth movement, Turning Point USA. His death is graced by moments of silence in the European Parliament, condolences from the British prime minister Keir Starmer, statements of mourning by AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama, words of affection from Democrat governors from Illinois to California to Pennsylvania, obituaries in the New York Times and Jacobin. Already, Kirk has been beatified as a saintly martyr, the lips of the entire political class sanctifying the lie: that he was a truth teller, a free speech warrior, a man committed to dialogue and debate, an advocate for non-violence, tragically slain for his words. And it’s the left’s fault he died.

He was none of these things. Mr. Kirk was a bigot who spread his hate to hundreds of thousands of young people. He fanned the flames of division and paranoia in this country that ultimately consumed him. He preached that the Civil Rights Act which ended Jim Crow segregation was a "huge mistake", that Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful”, that black people “committed less crime” as chattel slaves, that the raping and pillaging of the earth, euphemistically called colonization, was a “net positive to the world”. He said that prominent black women are not competent, but got there by stealing a “white person’s slot”. He believed Islam was a sword to "slit the throat of America”, that “Jewish money" ruined American culture, that LGBT identities are a “contagion” and that doctors who serve trans patients should face capital punishment in “Nuremberg Trials”. Approvingly, he would cite Bible verses that “gays should be stoned to death”, that women like Taylor Swift should “submit to your husband”.

He loved whipping up division and provoking the racial anxieties of his white audience. He said if Trump loses, “there will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters”. He advocated a vigilante “citizen force” at the border to protect against the Haitian refugee “invasion” and prevent the “diminishing and decreasing of white demographics in America.”  Gleefully, he supported whipping migrants on horseback. When his field director resigned for texting "i hate black people. Like f— them all” he said America needs more people like that. He supported the conspiracy of the “great replacement theory”. He constantly incited violence against the “prowling Blacks”, and regime change in other countries (Iran, Libya) whose oil he said he wanted to seize.

Mr. Kirk hated free speech and loved violence, especially for political ends and against political figures. He called for his critics to be stripped of their citizenship for their speech (Mehdi Hassan, Ilhan Omar, etc), and for immigrants to be imprisoned and deported at an authoritarian scale. He set up a purge list of professors and school boards he wanted fired. He celebrated extrajudicial violence in the United States and mocked its victims: Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three men in Kenosha under the cover of BLM protests, he praised. He called for “patriots” to bail the failed assassin of Paul Pelosi out of jail, even as Mr. Pelosi was in the ICU for a fractured skull. He never let George Floyd rest in peace, calling him a “scumbag”. He was a key operative during the deadly Jan 6 insurrection when Trump lost the election. Asked about how he could support the widespread availability of firearms in the age of Columbine, he said some gun deaths are “worth” it as the price of freedom.

Perhaps his greatest venom he reserved for the rest of the world. He blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Russia. He rationalized the destruction of Gaza and denied the starvation of its people, against all evidence. He rooted incessantly for Palestinians to be killed and expelled, to make room for the Biblical in-gathering of the Jews and the beginning of the end times. That jarring scene of Charlie Kirk’s neck spurting blood has been done to countless Palestinian children, women and men over the past two years. It's on camera and we see it, everyday, if you have the stomach to look. And yet day after day, Charlie Kirk essentially came out and said: “It’s not happening but also I want more of it." For him, this kind of mass murder was normal, and he loved the people who did it, and wanted them to continue. No wonder that Israeli politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir mourn his lost: he kept the MAGA youth from questioning why the U.S. should support genocide.

He enjoyed using the Bible to justify cruelty. He invoked Scripture to defend a violent apartheid system in Palestine. He claimed to be Christian, but his economic vision (austere, unequal, kleptocratic, environmentally destructive) was wildly at odds with Christian social teaching and Christ’s message to be good stewards of the earth and help the poor. For Kirk, no one should retire; you work until you’re dead. Young people shouldn’t go to college. Unions should be outlawed or defanged of any bargaining power. He claimed to be a free thinker, but TPUSA is generously funded by right-wing billionaires and politicians in the Republican party. When his pedophile idol Donald Trump called him to stop talking about the Epstein files, he dutifully backed down, like an obedient propagandist does. His main function to the donors and the party was to steer young conservatives into the Trump fold, not to think for themselves.

Charlie Kirk did not tell the truth. He lied and lied and lied and used his mega-platform to preach lies. He lied about voter fraud in the 2020 election, saying the election was stolen from Donald Trump. He said Palestinian isn’t a real identity, and Palestine isn’t a real place. He lied about COVID, saying ingesting hydroxychloroquine was “100% effective” against the disease. He said vaccines are “medical apartheid” and that social distancing was a "Democratic plot against Christianity”. He said the fentanyl crisis was a plot by the Chinese community party. He lied about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, promoting the lie that they were eating dogs. He lied about the scientific consensus on climate change and said there was no evidence for it. He lied saying Hamas beheaded babies and gang raped Israelis on October 7. He even lied about Jews, saying they control the colleges, nonprofits, movies, and Hollywood.

How naive some liberals are, who bought into the pretense of the 'change my mind' TPUSA campus debates and imagine these events as some kind of good-faith forum for engaging with different political views. A 30 year old man-child like Charlie Kirk punching down on some mumbly 18 year olds by deflecting constantly and talking over them and then using that to generate short-form video content for TikTok and Instagram is exactly the kind of “division” and vacuous “outrage politics” that liberals like Ezra Klein claim they despise. Contrary to the pious liberal myths, "debating" the basic rights of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities does not help anyone. It's offensive, and it platforms bigots who should be shunned. TPUSA is more heat than light, more lies than truth. I want to live in a world where fascists like Charlie Kirk are afraid that if they speak lies and incite violence, they will face consequences.

What of the shooting? Mr. Kirk died doing what he loved: disputing gun violence statistics to blame black people and transgenders. If the news is correct, the shooter is a 22-year-old far-right white man from a Republican family in Utah who loves guns and gave $225 to Trump’s election campaign. His motivation? We will see. Perhaps it was Kirk's weak and inconsistent support for releasing the Epstein files. What is true is the shooter likely emerged from the same ideologically unstable, white-nationalist groyper milieu that people like Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes spent so much energy cultivating. This shouldn’t be surprising; most assassins of public figures in the U.S. are conservative white men. The killer of Minnesota Speaker of the House and her husband was a Trump supporter. So was the failed assassin of Pennsylvania governor, the men who tried to hang Mike Pence, the orchestrator of the shooting of four elected officials in New Mexico in 2022. Even the shooter at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania was a Republican. It goes on and on.

And yet, the far-right is using this attack to declare war on the left: Matt Walsh, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, Chris Rufo, and Trump himself are all calling for heads to roll. They want to imprison, deport, bankrupt, and outlaw leftists and left-wing organizations. That’s the game plan. The new State Department guidance for instance is that you may be deported for criticizing Charlie Kirk. And yet, the bloodshed of this country needs to end. As a leftist, I agree with Trotsky that “if we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to be presented to some functionary called a minister.” As it says in Ephesians 6:12, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world”. My problem, in other words, is not with Charlie Kirk and his personal views, as depraved as they are; my problem is with the institutional apparatus that gave him power and influence.

I am angered by the double standard by which the life of Charlie Kirk is eulogized and mourned far more than the thousands of people whose violent death he rooted for all these years. If we believe in the sacredness of all human life, then may we pray Kirk finds in death what he denied so many in life: divine justice. I also recognize that shooting propagandists in the neck and celebrating their downfall will not end their appeal. The right-wing will make him into a martyr like the Nazis did with Herbert Norkus and Horst Wessel. The truth is Mr. Kirk will probably be forgotten in two weeks and replaced by someone just as rancid. To make real progress, we have to build counter-institutions in the media, the economy, and the government. To end the bloodshed, we must fight against virtually everything Mr. Kirk stood for.